Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life

Living in a Time of Diminishing Expectations

verfasst von: Gargi Bhattacharyya

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Will austerity never end? This timely and insightful book argues that austerity seeks to set the terms of political and economic life for the foreseeable future, extending techniques of exclusion to ever-greater sections of the population.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. Is it Too Late to Write a Book about Austerity?

Abstract

This is a work that tries to describe the immense changes that have been implemented in the name of austerity in the early twenty-first century across Europe and that seeks to imagine the world after austerity. This is an approach that understands that there will be a time when ‘austerity’ ends, although the repercussions of what has been enacted in its name may continue to reverberate. This work presents ‘austerity’ in the twenty-first century as a time-limited campaign that mobilises the sense of crisis in order to institute some extreme and hitherto unexpected measures within a short period. Yet this approach, reliant as it is on crisis-rhetoric, cannot continue indefinitely, and it will end at some point. However, the end of austerity is not a return to things as they were. This volume seeks to demonstrate both that austerity is a campaign to transform everyday life, including when the urgency of austerity as crisis-response has passed, and that this campaign seeks to remake the terrain of the social in such a manner that previous agreements about equality and the reach of mutuality are under threat.

Gargi Bhattacharyya

2. The Primacy of the Economic and the Degradation of Politics

Abstract

This chapter reviews the circumstances that have given rise to the primacy of economistic thinking and rhetoric in electoral politics. This chapter argues that this focus on economic management, of a particular sort, above all other considerations, has led to a degradation of mainstream political life. Together these two trends, towards instrumental economism and away from meaningful political participation, make space for the larger diminishment of expectations that is an outcome of the project of austerity. This chapter offers an account of the impact of the pursuit of economism on the democratic cultures of our time.

Gargi Bhattacharyya

3. The Institutionalisation of Despair and Diminishing Expectations

Abstract

This chapter maps the emergence of an institutionalisation of despair and argues that this decisive shift in the articulation of expectations represents something distinctive about this moment of austerity. In particular, I want to argue that the combined impact of a degradation of the space of politics as a result of an unquestioning subservience to economic imperatives and the institutionalisation of despair through a range of adaptations and adjustments in the regulation and administration of everyday life are designed to actively diminish our expectations, both individually and collectively. The diminishing of expectations is a distinctive project of changing popular consciousness. Unlike previous approaches to rally electoral support through garnering consent among diverse interest groups, this is a cultural project for a time of political disengagement.

Gargi Bhattacharyya

4. Austerity and Extending the Racial State

Abstract

What might we include in a chapter about the impact of austerity on cultures of racism? Perhaps some thoughts on the further marginalisation of the already disadvantaged, often migrants or those of migrant heritage. Certainly, something on the excessive agitation around the issue of migration and how this spills over into all other areas of political debate when political debate is framed by the scarcity logic of austerity. Perhaps even some consideration of the re-awakening of that perpetual light-sleeper, European anti-Semitism, as old narratives of scapegoating and hatred are dusted off for contemporary use.

Gargi Bhattacharyya

5. Reproductive Labour in Austere Times

Abstract

This chapter considers the often-repeated allegation that austerity targets women disproportionately and represents an erosion of key gains that have remade the lives of many women in recent years. In the process, there is an attempt to consider the modes of gendering through public policy under the much-mourned recent period of welfare capitalism and to gain an understanding of the enormity of the changes that we are now living through. Cultures of reproduction and associated expectations of gendering play their part in this reconfiguration, but the deployment of gender mythologies is oddly erratic.

Gargi Bhattacharyya

6. Ending — Surplus Populations and Austerity Forever?

Abstract

This volume is an attempt to understand a particular moment of crisis and change as it impacts on the political cultures of locations that have been among the most economically powerful spaces of the world, but whose global power and influence are in rapid decline. Largely, I take my cue from events across Europe and regard austerity measures not only as an attempt to consolidate the position of the privileged within these nations in decline but also as an indication of battles within Europe to maintain first-world power and privileges for some. Whether these some are to be demarcated by national or class boundaries — or perhaps by some negotiation between these two sets of interests — remains to be seen.

Gargi Bhattacharyya

Backmatter

Titel: Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life
verfasst von: Gargi Bhattacharyya
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-41112-9
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-41111-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411129

Springer Professional

Über dieses Buch

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. Is it Too Late to Write a Book about Austerity?

2. The Primacy of the Economic and the Degradation of Politics

3. The Institutionalisation of Despair and Diminishing Expectations

4. Austerity and Extending the Racial State

5. Reproductive Labour in Austere Times

6. Ending — Surplus Populations and Austerity Forever?

Backmatter

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